The Man Who Couldn't Die Read online

  Another motif associated with his wartime glory is the huge, gilded German bed that he brought home as a trophy and upon which he lies for the fourteen years of his paralysis. We learn that on this luxurious bed, Alexei also repeatedly raped his wife, Nina. The motif of rape in connection with the German bed serves to point at the unnamed by Slavnikova, but well-known to the Western reader, rampage of sexual violence during the Red Army’s victorious raid across Germany at the end of World War II.

  It turns out that the authenticity of Alexei Afanasievich’s postwar experience is also quite questionable: “In all the decades of their life together, the Kharitonovs had never reminisced about anything together. They hadn’t accrued any symbolic property in common, such as any love, however brief, immediately tries to acquire.”

  Eventually, Slavnikova’s analytical gaze reveals that the old scout’s authenticity has only one real foundation—his association with death: “There was something odd and even sinister to Alexei Afanasievich’s abnormal longevity.” A continuing reversal of meaning between life and death, blurring the distinction between these states, permeates the entire novel. Death is present not only in Alexei Afanasievich’s wartime past but also in his ice-cold family life after the war, and of course, in his present half-dead condition. A thick web of motifs associated with death surrounds this character, just as themes of sleepwalking surround Nina and themes of emptiness—Marina:

  He was already a failed product of death, a defective good from whom death had taken a step back without dispensing with the continuity of life in his illuminated consciousness. The veteran had not reconciled himself to this and was now planning to make death by his own hand—to repeat the mirror image of what he had done to others with such ease.

  Husband and wife had tacitly admitted the possibility of death and its legitimate proximity. After this chaste barrier fell between the Kharitonov spouses, death for Nina Alexandrovna and Alexei Afanasievich became something much less shameful than their clumsy nighttime lovemaking, no hint of which had been permitted during the sensible daytime hours.

  The similarity between death and sexuality in these passages is not a Freudian slip of the writer’s pen. Rather, this is the true meaning of nostalgia for “Soviet authenticity,” of the post-Soviet attraction to “Soviet glory”—it elevates death as the only authentic truth, the supreme social and individual value. In short, nostalgia is self-destructive, as the novel’s plot vividly demonstrates.

  The interweaving of motifs associated with the novel’s characters as well as with the satirical representation of hidden electoral mechanisms produces a surreal effect that transforms Slavnikova’s seemingly realistic close-ups into a parade of monsters. Her text is inhabited by people who look like smaller copies of themselves, foreheads covered with natural wooden patterns, faces reminiscent of minerals: “His large face was made up of parts that looked sanded, without any wrinkles whatsoever, and between these broad patches of youth lay winding darknesses that also looked sanded, darknesses that retained the professor’s age, like soil in the cracks of a polished stone.” These transformations of the human into the nonhuman are coupled with opposite metamorphoses, when objects act like living beings. Consider “an awful old leather bag sewn from scraps that looked like a creation of Dr. Frankenstein’s…She’d hoped that the shapeless monster, to which she would never entrust even the smallest denomination of currency, would digest everything she didn’t want to remember during her tense daily labors and especially at night.” Or “the heavy bus, which kept dropping on its ass,” or the “shuddering elevator, whose buttons had turned into black ulcers long ago,” or the door, “which had occasionally dropped rusted-through wallpaper nails, like rotten teeth.” These monstrous creatures are the embodiment of ressentiment; they visibly materialize what is brewing inside people and inside the country. They manifest phantasms that occupy reality, taking control of time and space.

  However, these spectacular metamorphoses add a supplementary dimension to The Man Who Couldn’t Die. Despite their depressing direct meaning, all these metaphors fill the novel’s style with wit, playfulness, and joyful estrangements. They establish tangible connections between Slavnikova’s novel and great literary predecessors—not only Bulgakov but also Andrei Bely, Dostoevsky, and Gogol. Through these links, Slavnikova situates post-Soviet ressentiment within a long (and wonderful) tradition of the Russian grotesque. This purely artistic twist offers a different perspective that overcomes the phantoms of the given time and suggests examples of productive distancing from contagious illusions shared by the majority.

  Nietzsche argued that ressentiment “itself turns creative and gives birth to values.”3 The Man Who Couldn’t Die shows exactly what kind of creativity and values the post-Soviet ressentiment gave birth to. Hopelessness and cynicism, a readiness to deceive and a willingness to be deceived, the valorization of death over life and of the past over the present (and future)—taken together they constitute the soil on which the aggressive nationalism and jingoism of the 2010s would breed. The art of distancing appears to be another value born out of ressentiment, and it offers a productive alternative, both intellectually and aesthetically, as Slavnikova’s novel dazzlingly demonstrates.

  Olga Slavnikova has a very serious view of literature, comparing it with the hard, fundamental sciences and treasuring its complexity of vision above popularity. She says in an interview:

  In my understanding, literature as an art form requires the same attitude as fundamental science. The uninitiated may find it incomprehensible. But one fundamental work of a mathematician, which, in the best-case scenario, only a thousand like-minded scholars understand, can completely change the picture of the world.4

  Obviously, this is her ambition as a writer. The Man Who Couldn’t Die accomplishes this maximalist program. The novel will stick in your mind like a splinter. It is as discomfiting as it is invigorating and provocative, yet its multifarious effects can change the picture of contemporary Russia by shaking numerous stereotypes and, at the very least, by eliding sweeping generalizations and oversimplifications about its past, present, and future.

  NOTES

  1. Valentin Lukianin, “Ural”: zhurnal i sud’by (Ekaterinburg: Kabinetntyi uchenyi, 2018), 530.

  2. Mikhail Iampolsky, “V strane pobedivshego resentimenta,” Colta.ru, October 6, 2014, http://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/4887.

  3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21.

  4. Iuliia Rakhaeva, “Olga Slavnikova: ‘Dialog idet mezhdu pisatelem i mirozdaniem, a chitatel’ lish’ prisutstvuet,’” Druzhba narodov 6 (2009), http://magazines.russ.ru/druzhba/2009/6/ra15.html.

  World War II veteran Alexei Afanasievich Kharitonov had been lying in the farthest and probably coziest corner of their standard-issue two-room apartment, immured in his enfeebled, emasculated body, for fourteen years. “A very good heart, a very strong heart,” Evgenia Markovna, the aging district doctor, who looked like nothing so much as a wise rat, murmured. Every month, her slender, wide-set legs took her to this apartment and this corner, where the paralyzed man was spread out under a blanket, on top of a fresh, tightly stretched sheet, wearing new, haphazardly pulled-on underpants with elastic like a machine-gun belt. “Just like a young man’s,” the educated old woman murmured as she ran a cracked sliver of cheap soap under the faucet while the veteran’s wife, the young pensioner Nina Alexandrovna, held a terrycloth towel worn to patches from laundering at the ready. Both women tacitly understood that talking about his heart was no explanation.

  There was something odd and even sinister to Alexei Afanasievich’s abnormal longevity. Unlike most of those by now legendary war’s veterans, whose numbers decreased erratically by the year, Alexei Afanasievich had gone off to war not as a boy but as a grown man who had already graduated and worked in a school for a while. And if those relatively young old men who gathered time and again under ne
w red banners, banners papery in the light, seemed like the offspring of the young men who had once gone off to the front—totally different people born out of life’s long dream, in which they had died, succumbing to its intolerable duration, the true bearers of the war’s memory—then Alexei Afanasievich, on the contrary, was striking for his authenticity, which had carried forward through the troubled and vividly illuminated years. By his mere presence he authenticated himself so thoroughly that, although he had never joined the Party, it would scarcely have occurred to anyone invested with power to ask for his ID. Each of this man’s positions and actions had lasted exactly long enough for him and the people around him to fully realize and remember what he had accomplished; the fifteen or so men he had once killed, as an army scout, without noise or weapon, were probably among the few who had come close to solving the riddle of death while still alive. Alexei Afanasievich had given them this knowledge, and blessed with it, their legs dancing, madmen looking vaguely past their own temple, they had dropped their submachine guns, bowls of soup, and dirty postcards to the ground. Alexei Afanasievich’s favorite weapon was a noose made of strong silk rope, which had an advantage over a knife: even on the darkest of nights, light of unknown origin would be caught and cast on a blade. That silk rope had never once failed him, and the scout himself, while stifling the fascist’s porridge-warm bellowing with his fist, palpably felt the moment when the soul quit the body with a jolt as gentle as a kitten’s jump. In intervals between dangerous jobs, so as not to lose his instrument, Alexei Afanasievich carried the noose around his own neck, the way other thoughtless men wore crosses in war. Occasionally, the worn cord was actually assumed to have a cross on it. Whether out of a manly distaste for snot-nosed washing, or out of concern that he would wash the patina and luck off the glossy silk, Alexei Afanasievich never rinsed the rope in any of the putrid bathhouses where he had occasion to steam away his own salty, frontline dirt—and as the rope became infused with his body, it became more and more a part of him. The scout had a raw red stripe on the back of his neck, where the filthy noose rubbed his spine, which was as skinny as a bicycle chain and slippery from sweat. In damp weather, Alexei Afanasievich would itch terribly from that crude mark forever after.

  After demobilization, Alexei Afanasievich, though he had eight medals and countless other minor decorations, did not try to become any kind of boss, devoting himself wholly (as the factory newsletter wrote) to peaceful work in a technical archive; however, the look from his cold eyes, with their stony streak of green, contained a warning, and his movements were such that an observer couldn’t help but think how much his sun-scalded arms, his lame leg, and his healthy leg weighed separately. Because of his frontline lameness, Alexei Afanasievich marched as if the left half of his body held an additional, ever-present burden that he had to carry wherever he went, tugging and adjusting the invisible straps more comfortably. Each subsequent step, taken as he leaned on his sturdy, far-reaching cane, depended not on topography but exclusively on the habit of his unhurried, twisted gait and the burden of himself (the burden of his heart, which thumped relentlessly on the left, under his shirt). Alexei Afanasievich lived without ever explaining anything to himself but rather as if remembering himself one part at a time—and because of this, everything he’d lived through stayed with him, as if the veteran’s existence simply couldn’t end because some part of his consciousness never dozed, reliably combining the present and the past, where he was always and forever alive. His authenticity seemed to guarantee his immortality, at the thought of which Nina Alexandrovna, being younger than her husband by exactly a quarter-century, felt a mute, superstitious question arise deep inside her and saw a clear picture arise of her own funeral, as if it were to take place the day after tomorrow—and how strange it would be for her, who slept on a cot beside her husband’s tall bed, to suddenly find herself lying higher than Alexei Afanasievich, on the dining room table, in her dress and shoes, under a funeral sheet.

  Fourteen years ago, Alexei Afanasievich’s procession across the earth had been cut irrevocably shorter when, after dinner, as he was smoking on their cramped, curly blooming balcony, his intrepid cane staggered under his considerable weight and started to shake. He himself remained standing briefly, perfectly erect, as if weightless, before collapsing onto the empty cans and basins, filling the entire wrecked patch of balcony. Nina Alexandrovna ran out from the kitchen at the terrible glass tocsin but couldn’t get onto the balcony because there was nowhere to step without stepping on Alexei Afanasievich, who had turned drastically white, like a belly half fallen out of a body, and she couldn’t see his face, just a lock of hair, perfectly still in the air, that had poked straight up when the back of Alexei Afanasievich’s head slipped, unconscious, down the balcony doorjamb. While the emergency crew was on its way and Nina Alexandrovna’s daughter Marina and her son-in-law Seryozha Klimov—at the time only a fiancé who spent the night—came running from friends’ and were able to tie towels together to drag the stuck body—which looked like it was trying to hug itself with its long outstretched arms—off the balcony, at least an hour and a half passed. Half of Alexei Afanasievich’s face was pulled down and oddly smeared, as if someone had tried to crudely wipe off his plain, soldierly features. His bristling eyebrows, which had always looked like two roosters, had now shifted in opposite directions, and his left eye, half-covered with a weakened eyelid, shone weirdly, a strip of bloody white.

  And so it remained, this half face, a mere profile of something human, no matter the angle. During periods of inexplicable improvement, which would come on suddenly, for no apparent reason, Alexei Afanasievich, pulling his lips back crookedly as if trying to chew on his creased cheek, occasionally emitted awful, long, viscous sounds reminiscent of the shouts of a drunkard gripped by indignation or a plaintive song. Sometimes his left arm would come to life, and he would drag it back and forth over the blanket and even hold objects, picking them up with a cautious, creeping movement, but the objects, turned oddly or all the way over, still couldn’t fill the emptiness of his stiffened hand. This overturnedness of the things in Alexei Afanasievich’s senseless hand expressed his loss of the verticals and horizontals of normal space. Once upon a time, Nina Alexandrovna, a petite woman with a girlish fluff of hair, had taken pride in her husband’s heroic height, six foot three, but now that number, which had probably not changed, had no physical meaning. Nor did his clothing sizes (Nina Alexandrovna simply bought whatever was roomiest from the assortment flapping in the wind at the wholesale market). Alexei Afanasievich’s lameness, which previously had elevated him even higher above the level crowd, had vanished: the absence of all the toes on his left foot except for the squeezed woody knot of a pinky toe looked like the damage to a statue for which the mind can so easily compensate. In the end, the paralyzed man’s body, still authentic in its presence, which occasionally even suffered ordinary human illnesses (a cold, gastritis), had no spatial dimensions at all, just weight, beneath which the old trophy bed, which looked like an iron carriage, would never clank again. Unless Alexei Afanasievich was touched, weight, that invisible property of immobile objects, was merely his means of interacting with the Earth’s equally abstract astronomical center. When Nina Alexandrovna turned his body, well-tended by a paralytic’s measure and marked by old scars like the pale, flattened stalks you see under boulders, it felt like she was moving by a millimeter the entire invisible earthly mass—which had taken the veteran for a natural part of itself. This daily effort took such exertion that sometimes Nina Alexandrovna had to sit out the taut blackness that pumped into her head and made her feel how flimsy the skull’s bindings creaking behind her ears really were. When she came to and found herself in the same place, though, she resumed her labors as if nothing had happened—with a light-mindedness that combined oddly with her short height and fine gray hairs, which you couldn’t see, actually, in her airy, very fair hair, and which only made it shine all the harder under the invariant light of household el
ectricity. She also continued to care for Alexei Afanasievich’s former clothing: his brown boots, whose aged layer of shoe polish looked like chocolate, stood in the front hall beside her dusty shoes; his puffy gabardine suit, which looked like it had inflated due to idleness, hung in the closet with mothballs in each pocket—readied long since for its final burial mission, in which, however, the veteran’s family both did not and did not want to believe.

  The fact was that the immobility permanently occupying the apartment’s far, dusky corner was more potent and vibrant than all the rest of their walking and talking family life put together. In the new era that had suddenly overtaken them, the Kharitonov family, which had not been handed any party favors at capitalism’s kiddie party, survived primarily on Alexei Afanasievich’s veteran’s pension. Heedless Nina Alexandrovna, who had spent her entire life in a quiet design office beside a nice clean window that was always decorated, like a scarf, with either frost patterns or fancy maple branches, had never worried about the future because for so many years each new day had been no different from the day before. Any small happiness, such as a length of stiff dyed Yugoslav wool or her coworkers’ wedding—two engineers, no longer young, identical in height, who for many years had not admitted their relationship to anyone and had finally found their way to the Registry Office—would completely obscure the future’s vagueness. Later, when all the air in the new life had become like it can be in a room where the windows are broken out and all the familiar faces have strangely drained into themselves, like water into worn sand, Nina Alexandrovna suddenly realized that now it was impossible, forbidden, and foolish to be happy for someone else. At that point her own joys suddenly seemed utterly insignificant, as if what she saw in her hand were cheap spangles, colorful rags, and crusted coins. As for actual money, using it took a special knack now. While inflating to incredible sums, it simultaneously deflated and melted away in her hands so that economizing made no sense. Nina Alexandrovna tried to lay in stores when she could. Once she bought a whole sack of incredibly cheap, coarse macaroni, which cracked woodenly in its paper bags and took an hour to cook, at which point the pot’s contents became an inedible paste. There were other food purchases as well, sprinkled with the poppy seed of insect excrement and splotched with greenish mold. Once, Nina Alexandrovna had her wallet stolen from her right in the store, in the cramped lines that stretched like anchor chains around the clattering cash registers, but instead of horror she experienced the only true relief she’d felt in years.